Page 223 of In Somnis

The tea is already working, or maybe the exhaustion is, or both, because a heaviness is settling behind my eyes. I let it come. If I hesitate now, I won’t do it. I only breathe as I think about my best friend.

Breathe in.

The sound of waves.

Breathe out.

Tessa’s green eyes.

Breathe in.

The sand.

Breathe out.

The doors standing in the tide.

The beach.

The beach… is warm when my bare feet sink into sand that is as fine as powder.

The sound fills in wave by wave, louder than I’ve ever heard water be. I look up and find doors standing in the surf, hundreds of them, every color I know and some I don’t, frames without walls, all of them facing the water, and the waves are coming higher than they should be, lapping at the bases of the nearest ones, pulling back, coming again.

I know this beach.

I look down at my hand.

They’re breadsticks, which means…

… I’m dreaming.

The lucidity clicks in, and with it, everything else. The urgency, and the thing I came here to do. I look up and down the waterline, and I call her name before I’m even fully oriented.

“Tessa!”

The waves swallow the sound.

“Tessa, I’m here!”

Nothing. There is no sign of her. Nowhere.

I run. The sand pulls at my feet, but I push through it, moving along the waterline, scanning every door I pass, looking for her outline against the color of them. The beach stretches, and the longer I run, the more certain I become of something I don’t want to be certain of.

She’s not here.

I slow, breathing hard, and stand there while the waves come in around my feet and pull back out. I turn toward the end of the beach.

The big door is where it was last time, standing apart from the others, the only one the waves haven’t reached yet. Dark wood, worn smooth, the grain of it in long flowing lines under my palm when I reach it.

I stand there with my hand on it and think about what I’m about to do.

It’s stupid. It is genuinely, objectively stupid. 5D is where identity doesn’t hold the same way, where Tessa has been drifting for twelve years without being able to find her way back out. I have no idea what going in means for me, whether I can follow her there and still be recognizably myself on the other side.

But if she stays in the in-between, she will keep deteriorating.

What if I get stuck in there?

What if that’s the point?